A blog about economics, finance, business and corporate governance. My background is in economics, with degrees from Columbia and Johns Hopkins. A career in international development, equity capital markets and as a corporate finance chief and board member lead me to think about events in a different way--hence the blog's name.

Monday, October 7, 2013

Checking In With Tech's Four Horsemen: Microsoft

As the whole CEO succession debacle continues to unfold at Microsoft, I continue to be amazed at their inability to deal with longstanding, loyal, zero resource demanding customers like myself in a way that makes me feel good about our relationship.

I somehow got signed on for a trial subscription to Office 365. I want to cancel and to find out how this subscription was initiated. Emails, after a lengthy delay, generated a support incident link; clicking on the link in my Chrome browser generated nothing by a little X in the center of the white screen. Lots of attempts to figure out how to change Chrome's settings to display the Microsoft page failed. "Aha," I said to myself, "of course, the geniuses at Redmond want to thumb their noses at Google and at me to make me use Explorer as my browser."

Reluctantly, I open the resource hogging, hacker inviting, slow as molasses IE, and it too cannot display the message from Microsoft support! More emails to Microsoft, using the address header eventually send instructions about going to "Internet Options," and authorizing Microsoft support twice as a trusted site, one on the support site, and a separate authorization for the secured support page. Ridiculous, right? This is their own browser and their own communication! After doing this a few time, Explorer still can't display whatever it is Microsoft is trying to tell me.

A couple of times, the site displays, flashes suddenly and then displays an error about frames not being able to be displayed. All of this because I want to cancel a subscription that I didn't intentionally order, if I ordered it at all. The last thing in the world I want to be doing is to be figuring out browser settings on my time.

After no communication to resolve my issue. I actually got a customer satisfaction survey about their support, without ever having resolved anything. It is the first time in my life I ever filled out a survey with every answer being the most unsatisfactory level possible. "How would you like to hear from us?" Smoke signals would suffice. A post card? Weeks have gone by and nothing from the company that Steve Ballmer has led into the brave new world of technology.

It is going to be a great supplier of technology hardware, software and entertainment to the masses. I don't think so because they have no idea what this involves.